Why stop at 15MW when you can make 18MW turbines? That’s a good question to ask Vestas. In the 150th Uptime podcast (wow!), Allen, Joel and Rosemary discuss the CEO’s surprising announcement and the market demands, risks, and potentially sneaky corporate strategy behind the scenes. Also in this show, we consider how those 115M blades will hold up at RWE’s Thor wind farm, which will be Denmark’s largest offshore development. And on Mt. Santis, researchers have shown that “massive” lasers can protect wind turbines from lightning. Is it scalable, and if so, does it make sense?
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma and Colorado, two turbines toppled and the internet raced for the best headline – but we want to know how OEMs, insurers, and asset owners will respond. Can they work together to keep wind energy moving forward? Finally, don’t miss a special bonus episode highlighting some surprises places to find US Wind Technicians.
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
PES Wind Article – https://pes.eu.com/exclusive-article/driven-by-data-2/
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Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Uptime 150
Allen Hall: We have a special double bonus episode this week. So now you’re gonna get this great episode, your weekly episode. We have a a, a bonus coming behind this, so it’s a super great week for uptime. We’re gonna talk about R W B E, selecting Siemens sch MEA for the Thor Wind Farm. Now isn’t that the coolest name for a wind farm?
Thor. Now, why does America have some cool offshore wind turbine names? Rosemary
Rosemary Barnes: and then we’re gonna talk about ve who are claiming that they’re going to stop at 15 megawatts for their offshore wind turbine, whilst at the same time Ming Yang is already pushing out to 18 megawatts.
Joel Saxum: So in, in Switzerland we’re gonna visit some of later laser-guided lightning.
We’ve seen this floater on LinkedIn quite a bit where they’re firing lasers to, to get lightning to track down the laser. And Alan will kind of give us a brief overview of why he does or does not think, That it’s commercially viable for wind turbines. And then jumping into a little bit of a review of GEs finances from the fourth quarter, what we think they mean and then a Bloomberg article about wind turbines taller than the Statue of Liberty falling over.
Wanting to understand what that means for the global market.
Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum, and soon to be guest host of the fully charged live event in Australia, Rosemary Barnes. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
All right. R d B has chosen Siemens ESA 14 dash 2 36 DD offshore Wind turbines. I God, I love that name. And they’re sticking with it. Joel? They have not changed the name of their wind turbines, and I can’t figure out if someone hasn’t like told them, but, all right.
Joel Saxum: That’s the king out there,
Allen Hall: so yeah. So the the r w has chosen them for the Thor Wind Farm in the Danish North Sea, and the Thor farm will be Denmark’s largest.
Offshore wind farm at roughly one gigawatt capacity once it’s completed. So those Siemens ga Mesa turbines are using their patented integral blades. So it’s all one piece cast as one piece. Rosemary, I don’t know if El ever tried that, but Siemens is doing it and they’re 115 meters in length now. Back to some earlier Joel points about these service contracts.
They did sign a PSA for the 72 Turbin. Which I’m, I’m sure is a pretty good money maker for Siemens. Now, the, the real trick is they’re gonna have this whole site completed by 2027. That’s pretty fast based on what the, some of the schedules are in America. Do the Danish know how to build wind TURs in the water better than America?
I guess that’s what it looks like.
Rosemary Barnes: I, I think the answer to that is yes, , those turnovers have, they’ve done us before. Right. How many have you got in America now? Like, just five. A couple. Oh, seven. Sorry. Seven. Seven. Yeah. So e, easy answer to that one. Yes. Let’s move on.
Allen Hall: Well, the, the kicker is, you know, Siemens, Siemens, esa won that patent dispute with ge. , and I wonder if this is part of the fallout of that is there’s, they’re starting to win some of these contracts just because they’ve got GEs hands tied for the moment.
Rosemary Barnes: But I mean, it is, it is Scandinavia. So that would be, yeah, I don’t know.
More I guess of a VE or Siemens type area. I know it was a big deal when GA started making deals in in Sweden. That was a, a super big deal for them. To break into that
Allen Hall: market.
So is there, there’s not a lot of service history on the, the 14 megawatt machines from Siemens Ka Mesa. That seems to be a big discussion around the world as, as these machines get bigger, especially when they cross a 10 megawatt size, that these don’t have a lot of history with them. Is that a concern at this point?
Like what and what do you do to, to hedge your.
Joel Saxum: I think it’s got, it definitely has to be a concern, right? So if the, it’s just like signing a contract on a car to maintain it when you’ve, there’s no experience in the model in sight, right? So I think when you’re talk, when you’re talking offshore in the North Sea, these companies have quite a bit of experience out there.
Right. So I think you can eliminate, so if you’re we’re talking hedging bets, you, you have the knowledge of operating out there. Mm-hmm. , that’s great. So you, you’ve got SOVs, you’ve got those kind of things taken. And that’s some of the big risk out there is u understanding logistics and those kind of things.
So that’s, that’s understand. Understood. Now, this 14,236 DD machine has been, there’s been one installed onshore for I think almost two years ago on. In Es Yes, in Berg. So you have the, the piece of it offshore, and then you have the, the, the one model that’s been running. So understanding, I mean, now granted small sample size, right?
So statistically that really doesn’t mean anything. But you have, you’ve, you’ve figured out how to do oil changes. You’ve figured out how to do these things. We don’t, we don’t know what issues might pop up with the blades. Of course, that’s a big one. When you get going to 115 meter blades out there.
So he hedging Beths I don’t know. You know, some of the other things we’re looking at, say, competitors to Siemens Veta is looking at 600 to 1.2 billion in, in possible slush fund for issues and warranty issues that pop up. So maybe you’re, maybe you’re getting reinsurance against your own stuff. I’m not sure.
To me it’s, it’s kind of a scary,
Allen Hall: And why did the Na, do the Danish get the best names for the wind? , like how did America miss out on that ? You know what I mean? Yeah. They’re Vikings, man. Yeah. Good ones. Naming a Thor is not a bad way to go. How can you lose? That’s the coolest name around. I worked with, everybody wants
Rosemary Barnes: to be working on that farm.
I worked a lot with a guy called TO in Denmark, and I thought it was the coolest, considered considered it as a name for my son, but I had to rule it out because of the. Pronunciation challenges between Scandinavia and
Joel Saxum: Australia. Yeah, the, I, I struggle with that over there. You used to quite a bit. I met a guy over there named Malis, but in a, in my American dial called him Magnet.
That’s another one that had to get rolled
Rosemary Barnes: out for the same reason until he finally
Joel Saxum: was. Yeah. Until he finally was like hey man, that’s not
Allen Hall: my name. So do we have to start naming the Wind Farms in America something cooler like Batman, Superman, captain, captain America.
Joel Saxum: Okay. Captain America Wind Farm would be pretty good.
It would odd.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m gonna be honest. I would totally trust you guys to actually do it too. And it would be an acronym. . It worked.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Well, getting back to offshore wind the head of Vestus Henrik Anderson said in a, in a couple of interviews, that vest is gonna stop at 15 megawatts offshore.
That they think the 15 megawatts is a big a machine they wanna deal with. They want to make sure, make sure that the quality and the durability are in to those 15 megawatts. And if they continue to make wind turbines that are larger, they’re just going more into the unknown. There’s a lot more risk and they just thought we’re done.
and, but at the same time, Vestus clearly knows that they’re gonna be at risk from all the Chinese manufacturers have just really falling behind. The GEs and the Siemens ESAs are not really going to stop. So is this a smart move by Vestus at this point? Just to hold at 15 megawatts and just maybe see where the marketplace.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. I don’t believe it. They, they might say that they’re gonna stop, but what are they, what are they gonna do when the market’s demanding more than that? Like, oh, okay, well, we won’t sell wind turbines anymore. You know, like they don’t get a choice about what people wanna buy. If other people are offering a bigger turbine and it works out cheaper on a per project cost, then they can choose to stop at 15 megawatts and choose to not make sales.
That doesn’t. Yeah, it doesn’t sound like good business practice to me. Yeah, the market market will run ’em right out. Yeah. I mean, as much as there’s huge technical risks with going big and, you know, we are seeing more failures and Sylvester could avoid all that, but you know, you can only survive so long without sales.
So unless their plan is that they let everybody else make these, you know, 20 megawatt sales and it bankrupts every other competitor. Then they can, you know, have, have every 15 megawatts out of themselves because they’re the only company left standing. But , I think that’s a pretty risky, risky strategy.
Can they wait it out, you know, the five or 10 years that would be the minimum that it would, would take. And I, yeah, it
Joel Saxum: goes against what we
Allen Hall: talk about. Yeah. Joel, what’s the, what’s the step between quality product versus in service life versus cheaper installation? I would, where, where’s that lie? I would
Joel Saxum: love to see.
Yeah, I’d love to see Vesta say, you know what, for now we’re stopping at 15 megawatts until we can get a proven da da da da next step. Because what we talk about in the program all the time is the issues that we see in the marketplace with innovation cycles being too fast. Yeah. Right. Like there’s, this model gets put out and that model gets put out and these blades are falling over and this.
generators crashing out and whatnot because they’re going, they’re not actually getting enough testing time with all these different things. So if they said, Hey, until 2028, we’re not, we’re only doing 15 megawatts. That seems more realistic to me. And I actually like the, I would like that approach. Mm-hmm.
to say, yeah, we’re, we may work on a bigger one at some point in time, but we’re gonna get a couple years of experience with it before we put it out in the market. Like that’s, , one of the things that we’re as an industry asking for, you know, so everybody wants the newest, greatest, best thing until it. Yeah.
I mean, it might be a good, right, so this is a, this was a topic, it might
Rosemary Barnes: be a good marketing strategy if Festers had this reputation for more reliable equipment than their competitors. But I mean, at least as far as I’m a aware, fester isn’t. You know, standing apart as the higher quality product At the moment, they’ve got just as, as many problems as everyone else, don’t they?
Yeah. What do you guys think? Yeah, if they, if they
Joel Saxum: talked about the v the V 90, then we would be great. That was a great platform that, that one just works . But yeah, in general there, there’s no, there’s no top tier, right? I, I, I guess I take that back. I say that the one thing I have heard in the marketplace is an intercon turbine.
a little bit of a step above
Rosemary Barnes: some of the others, especially from service technicians always tell me how much they love to work in Anacon. Turon, I say it’s like, it’s like working in a Mercedes or something.
Joel Saxum: nice. Yeah. So I, I think that saying that that’s all they’re gonna do it’s just, it just can’t be true for one.
But I dunno, maybe there’s, there’s some tactic behind
it,
Allen Hall: maybe some strategy behind it. So if you remember several years ago when Airbus built the A three. , which is the double decker. Massive. It’s all 400 people, 600 people. Mm-hmm. some crazy numbers. Right. They kind of got goed into that by Boeing, that Boeing faked out.
The, the, the word on the street is that Boeing threw out some ideas about some r 7 47. That was where the hump would’ve been stretched, and so they had this like double. Full double decker, 7 47 that was being banted around and they felt like all the hub up and the discussion and all the nuances that Boeing was gonna do, this made Airbus jump into the three, the three 80.
And then Boeing didn’t make that airplane. They made this 7 87 instead, which is a much smaller. . So there is a little bit of corporate espionage I’d call it, or trickery, that that is played at a very high level and that you wonder if this is something that Vestus is talking about. It’s like, Hey, we’re gonna stop here.
But in the back room spec here in the corner, I have a bunch of engineers working on a 25 megawatt machine, . Okay? Right? And, and maybe that’s what’s happening. It wouldn’t be the first time. There’s big stakes. This is, this is high stakes poker, right? and you see some of the bigger players playing it at a, at the highest level possible.
Us on the sidelines don’t know all the inner details, but I Rosemary’s probably right? They probably can’t stop here. No. But so we’ll see how everybody else reacts to that. I’ve
Joel Saxum: got one more question for you guys on this one. So the last bullet, the last bullet point here in our notes we’re talking about Chinese manufacturers and possibly S str E or G emit building larger.
at what level? If the, if the, if a Chinese manufacturer say, Ming Yang has the eight 18 megawatt machine out. Now, if they come out and say, right, we’ve got one 18 megawatts, what cost does that one have to be less than a European built turbine for someone to actually pull the trigger on installing those in Western waters?
Rosemary Barnes: Well, I, I mean, I, I, I don’t know that turbine doesn’t exist yet. And it definitely I mean even the, the company doesn’t have a really long track record of reliable operation in you know, in Europe or North America at least. And so I think that they would be competing on things other than, than just price there.
But. I mean at, at some point it, it is gonna come down to that, but I think at the moment there’s such a, you know, like. , a rush to install wind turbines. Such a backlog of orders and supply chain problems, and everything that I think that everything that gets made is gonna sell at the moment. So I, I think it’s probably a, a good time to be to be taking a, a.
A strategy, live risky strategy like that, because I think, I mean, I don’t think that the, yeah. Turbines are just gonna sit around over the next 10 years. I mean, everybody’s got 20, 30, you know, intermediate targets on the way to net zero and mm-hmm. . They’re gonna need every wind turbine that can possibly be made up until then.
So I think you’d have to really come up with a, a shocker to have a, you know, a turbine not sell at all. If, if you could make it and supply it at a Yeah, right. Reasonably competitive
Joel Saxum: cost. One of the things we looked at a couple months ago, was it some of the Chinese turbines coming in at about 30% of the cost of the European built.
and that’s still, yeah, kind of quite, wasn’t enough to move the, to move the dial yet, but I think the time will come
Rosemary Barnes: 30% less than the European
Joel Saxum: thir. 70% less 30% of the cost. , yeah, it was like 300, 300,000 a megawatt versus a million a megawatt. Wow,
Rosemary Barnes: I hadn’t seen those numbers. And, and that’s not, that’s not enough.
The perception of difference in quality is so great that they would rather have one European turbine than three Chinese ones.
Allen Hall: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that’s seems to be the way they’re going. Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Do you happen to know Joel, since you, you’re the expert on this topic, according to me. Do you happen to know, are there quality are there quality, you know, statistics out there that would back that up or is that just snobbery?
Western snobbery?
Joel Saxum: I think Western snobbery, I haven’t seen it. Well, look, I, I don’t have, we don’t have the experience in it. I know from the Wind Power Lab side, I haven’t, I don’t know anybody directly involved with maintaining or operating a Chinese turbine person. .
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. No, me neither. But I mean, I do have experience with a lot of stuff that’s been made in Chinese factories, and I know that there’s no difference in, in quality out of the, you know, European owned Chinese factories, although American owned Chinese factories.
So I couldn’t, I, it, it’s mind blowing to me that it could be such a difference. You, you know, have I sell a product for triple the price because of reputation. If there wasn’t, you know, hard data behind it, that’s Very surprising to me.
Allen Hall: Get the latest on wind industry, news, business, and technology sent straight to you every week.
Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter@weatherguardwind.com slash news. Well, if you’ve watched any buck rodgers com or seen any Buck Rogers comics or watched any chain bond movies, right, you, you see that lasers can do miraculous. , well up in Switzerland, they’ve been using lasers to trigger lightning strikes.
Now, that doesn’t seem obvious on its face, like how do lasers trigger lightning strikes? Well, these lasers are, are terawatt lasers, so there’s, they’re really powerful lasers and they’re pulsing really, really fast. Fast enough that they ionize the air, they actually break down the air, superheat the air to where it becomes conductive.
So they’re knocking electrons off of air molecules and everything becomes happy and somewhat conductive. And the, so the little trick here is up in Switzerland there’s a satis mountain. I’m gonna butcher the name, satis is the way I pronounce it. But there’s a Swiss mountain called Satis, which has been a research facility for lightning forever.
And they have all the instrumentation, all the cool stuff up there. They also have a tower that’s instrumented so they can record all the lightning parameters around a particular strike. . So what they did is they took this terawatt power laser. They put it next to this lightning tower and they fire this laser up in the air.
Now mind you, they closed down the airspace. So they didn’t shoot down an airplane or anything . So they closed the airspace off, shot this laser up there when there was a thunderstorm around and triggered lightning four separate times. Now that’s interesting because it hasn’t really been done. Out outside in the real world, they use lasers inside the laboratory for 20 plus years to trigger electrical breakdowns.
But out in the real world, they haven’t been any known triggered strikes, so they could actually trigger a strike. And then, you know, as soon as that happened, and, and there’s an article published in Nature, I think it was in. , the internet exploded about it. , so everywhere. It was like, Hey, they got this cool new thing.
Maybe we can use it on a wind turbine. Rosemary, all, all the lightning protection on a wind turbine could come off, or we could use it on a building or something to trigger lightning or. Iran Rocket launch facilities like Keep Canaveral.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, sure. It sounds much, much simpler than just running a cable down, down the blade, doesn’t it?
You just have a a t scale laser pointing next to every, every turbine. That sounds cheap and, and reliables,
Allen Hall: right. And, and power. Well,
Joel Saxum: that’s, that’s the trick, right? Power efficient, right? If you’re making, you’re only making megawatts of power and then you gotta shoot tewa lasers. There’s just zero sum game here somewhere.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a little tricky. I mean, the, the, the, the technology’s interesting and it may have some applications because we can use it to see inside of, of clouds. Basically, you can learn more about what electric activity is happening in the cloud by triggering lightning strikes. But you already have a way to do that right now, which, rocker Trigger Lightning, which those experiments have been happening down in Florida, 20 oh, longer than that, probably 40 years in other places around the world.
So what you do, instead of firing a laser up, you just take a little estes rocket and you put a spool of wire behind it, and yet just shoot it up into the sky when there’s a thunderstorm. Inamo, there’s , there’s a lightning strike. So there are cheaper ways to trigger lightning, I guess the question. Is the industry, like, is the wind industry looking at alternatives?
Is that something that they would even blink at? I, I think that the industry is so in the mode of where they’re at, which is what Rosemary is talking about, putting a cable inside the wind tur blade that they would not consider any other technology because of the cost go. Going back to Joel’s point, just because of the.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. If the cost potential, if the cost saving potential isn’t there, then you wouldn’t bother pursuing it. All of these ideas sound like the kind of idea that we would talk about in the, you know, in the canteen at you know, wind, wind energy company. But would you progress it? I mean, I think it’s pretty telling if you are literally saying a cheaper, a cheaper option would be to fire rockets into the sky and, you know, I think.
That might be an indication that your technology is too expensive. Yeah, so I think, I think probably not the, these things are. The work is cool. I mean, for the reasons that you say like, it’s great to learn, learn more about lightning and that’s definitely needed for right. Wind, wind, turbine blade, lightning protection design.
We need to understand lightning better so that we are more confident about how a lightning protection system is going to behave in the field. You know, before it gets out there because it’s such a, such a, Problem. I mean, we were talking before about how fast technology is moving and, you know, you’ve got one prototype turbine that’s been operating for a year or two and that’s not enough.
Or, you know, you just consider how many times that turbine’s been struck by lightning and it’s in its experience. It, you know, it may well have been strucker once or or twice in its test year, but certainly that’s not enough to make sure it’s gonna withstand every single type of lightning that you’re gonna experie.
Around the world to know what it’s gonna behave like when, you know, materials aren’t brand new anymore because obviously you, you know, there’s a difference in how materials conduct or insulate when they’re brand new versus when they’ve got, you know, little micro damage through them. Like a, a wind turbine gets after it’s been, you know, flexing around a few thousand times.
Allen Hall: Right. Well, I, I, I look at it this way because there’s similar experiments going on with airplanes at the moment. There’s, I won’t name the research institute that’s looking at this, but there there’s been some recent articles about instrumenting aircraft so that they’re struck by, not struck by lightning or maybe struck by lightning less.
It’s interesting from a researcher standpoint that if I’m making an airplane or am I making it wind turbine, what am I gonna do? Probably nothing because if the system doesn’t work or that one of a thousand lightning strikes hits my wind turbine slash or my airplane, it’s still gonna be bad. I’m still gonna put all the lightning protection back into the product.
Anyway, so the this cool lightning triggering device on airplanes and wind turbines is just dead weight in, in a. It doesn’t change the way you would design a product, and I think that’s where everybody gets stuck at like, okay, I implement this really cool laser idea. Do I take all the lightning protection out of the wind turbine blades?
Probably not, because it only takes one lightning strike. Then I’m, I’m down. I, I’ve just destroyed a turbine. It’s not worth it. I think that’s the real trade off at the end of the day is that you’re still stuck with the technology you have because it works at least, at least decently.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, right now it’s just a, it’s a research experiment, right?
And it’s cool. Something different, different may come out of it along the lines, right? Like we, we’ve talked about many times here is that we need to have people doing this, this smart kind of research to, to spur on innovation and other, other sectors. And you know, it’s the same way that technology from an F1 race team makes it into your car eventually.
But yeah, for right now it’s just kind of like a, a non star. Like if you could go more practical, if you want to get something instead of instead of this, put a 500 meter tower in the middle of the wind farm, that’s just another a hundred meters taller than the rest of them.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Even that is spotty
That’s what they, right. Yeah. I mean, it’s just Even when they try to spotty, yeah. Does that make, does that make sense? I, I think that’s, that’s the, the logic I use with it is what I change, what I’m doing right now. I think the answer is generally no. But I could, I could be convinced. And the, the other little bit to this, I think is just their I’ll go to the Rosemary point.
Until you actually work in industry and understand all the little nuances to why a design is the way that it is. As a researcher, you don’t, you’re not really plugged into that too much. So it looks like, look, I could do this really cool thing and maybe make an impact in this renewable energy field, which would be great.
That’d be fantastic. , but they’re not really plugged into the lunchroom situation like Berry is, right? Where they’re all sitting around talking about why they designed everything the way that they do it, and if, if the researchers were in that mode, were in that space and were learning those things, I’m not sure they’d be doing some of these experiments.
That’s why I thought, because there’s so many things that we could be doing in the lightning space at the moment that we’re not. Just because there’s a disconnect between the, on the ground in the factory engineers and the researchers in the universities and laboratories across the world. So GE Renewables had a big meeting while GE in, in total had a, their quarterly results published and they broke out renewable energy.
So you can see some of the details inside the renewables wind turbine business for, for. and 2022, it would be a year or two, probably forget because it lost a little over 2 billion in that portion of the business and everything was down. I was Joel, I was going through all the numbers here. If you look at 2022, they sold a little over 2100 turbines and they had 2200 turbines ordered.
Those are decent. , but in perspective that was down over 25% versus 2021 in orders and sales for new turbines. It, it was just, that’s crazy. Down a lot. And, and, but Repowering weirdly enough, was fairly were stable somewhat in terms of sales orders were down for repower by about 50%, which is odd because you think, gee, does that make sense?
Really into the repowering business, right. I mean, that’s a, that’s gotta be a sweet spot. Yeah. So we got the, the clock is ticking right, and 2024 is coming pretty quick. I, I don’t know what the plan is here. If you look at the, the GE Power Business, which is the non-renewable portion of GE Renova, it seems to be doing okay.
It’s making a little bit of money. They obviously have a footprint in the marketplace. They are well known. They think they’re gonna be in like a single digit growth, growth for 2023 in that business. But the boy, the renewable side is not looking so hot. Is this just a temporary dip in where GE is going long?
I hope
Joel Saxum: so. To be honest with you, I, I really hope so. It’s odd to me to see some of these numbers after that. I, the i a bill had come out, especially the repower ones, you know, cause there’s probably a lot of people that are sitting there like, yes, we’re running, we’re running, we’re running. And then I know, but, but I also do know this from in industry knowledge, ge doing repowers can be kind of a pain to deal with.
I’ve heard it from a couple of different people where GE basically says, this is how we’re gonna do your. . And if you don’t like that, then we’re out. Like they say, this is how we’re doing blades. This is how we’re doing generators. This is what we’re doing for bearings. We’re gonna run the whole thing.
It’s gonna cost bam. And if you don’t like that, then there’s no, no leeway. To me that’s, that’s a tough way to do business.
Allen Hall: But what’s driving that though? What, what’s the reasoning behind it?
Joel Saxum: You know what? I’m not a hundred percent sure. I think part of it is a, a controls thing. You know, I’ve, I’ve also heard people in the, in the marketplace saying, you know, we have GE controls in our turbines, but they have stuff locked out.
Like we can’t even get access to them. So it’s almost like they want to keep Yeah, like they want to keep their, it’s like the, you know Ford making special tools that only the Ford technicians can buy to fix your cars kind of thing. Or you know, John Deere or John Deere tractors and only the, only the John Deere technician can plug into it with his computer.
So if you’re 10,000 acres away, , you gotta wait for him to get out there to fix it. So it could be some of that driving it. So that’s a strategy standpoint, right? Strategy, tech technology driven by strategy. But 25, I mean 25%. We know that the wind industry can be kind of cyclical. There’s a lot of growth in it, of course.
Right. But you’re seeing, you see numbers up and down, up and down. You don’t see, no matter if it’s Vestas, Siemens, k Mesa, there’s never this like nice, steady. Curves, whether they’re growth curves or flat or they’re up, down, up, down, up, down all the time, depending on the geopolitical climate in certain parts of the world and what’s happening with offshore wind and onshore wind and, you know, big bills getting passed over here like the IRA bill or in other places, you know, like I know there’s talk of opening up the, the southern part of the UK back to onshore wind, which has had a moratorium on it for a while.
That’ll drive some sails. if it happens, right? So there’s, there’s all these up, down, up, down left rights. So if I’m, if I’m valuing a company or looking to invest in it, and I see 25% drop, that’s a tough one to stomach sometimes.
Allen Hall: Oh yeah. The, the number’s gotta be a little scary. I’m sure they saw them coming in about June, July, or August of, yeah, last year.
Like, ooh, the, the second half of this year is not gonna be so hot. , but they have, they have at least a little bit of breathing space that, that scary part about this from my perspective is when they start singling out a particular part of a particular business, the financial numbers from the remainder of the business, it always gives you that little sinking feeling like, Ooh, there’s this little piece over here that’s causing us all this pain.
Maybe we can get rid of this piece and sell it off. And then all the remainder will be nice. Happy profit margin time. That’s disturbing to me as, jeez, at the last remaining us yeah. Wind turbine manufacturer. What the heck? Right. How, how
Joel Saxum: many, how many people lost their positions when they did the cuts back in December or November?
Ooh.
Allen Hall: You know, yeah. It was 10%. I wasn’t like 10% of the workforce. It was something like that.
Joel Saxum: Was that, I mean, was it like 2000
Allen Hall: number. Well, yeah. It ha it have to be roughly
Joel Saxum: sure. So, I mean, so I mean, if you can equate some of that, I mean, some of those are high order engineers, you know, there’s, there’s some, there’s some, yeah, there’s some heavy salaries in there.
Allen Hall: I mean, but they’re not 2 billion worth.
Joel Saxum: No, it’s two. Two or two or 300 billion. Right? Yeah. So there’s a little
Allen Hall: bit there. Yeah, there’s a little bit. It really comes down to sales, you know, and in some part it has to be just sales driven. , are they not competitive in the, in the marketplace at the moment because of pricing, because of liability?
What’s driving all that? I think as we’re gonna discuss here, there’s some concerns about some of the GE turbines that are out there and, and maybe it’s just a, a perception more than it is a reality, and that when a, a GE turbine has a problem, it gets huge, wide. Notice about across the world and right. Am I, am I wrong about that?
I don’t think so. Look
Joel Saxum: at their fleet in the past, right? GE one five s a GE one five, depending on what blades on it was a workhorse. There’s tons of ’em installed. The US is full of those things. So they did really good with those. Xes sles, they did really well with them. And then they went to the one X, you know, 1.6 is one point sevens and eights.
But now that they’re starting to expand their portfolio, , you know, the cypress, what are they? Five megawatts and some of the other ones. There’s, I don’t know if the developers are looking to install those, to be honest with you. Right. So there’s, there’s little niches and, and, and pockets of we’re in, you know, a low wind area or the wind resource here is different and some of the better spots have already been picked up for some of these other types of wind turbines.
Sure. And maybe they don’t have one that’s in that sweet spot right now. I don’t know. That would be a technology limitation rather. Sales limitation, but I’m
Allen Hall: not, I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. Right. And, and GE historically wants to be number one or number two in their market space. Right.
That’s, that was a mantra way back when. And I used to work there and they would, if you were number three or four in the marketplace, your little division got sold off. And it’s, it’s, that legacy, I think, still kicks around in the, in the upper echelon of ge. I’m sure that it does because the people that are.
at those levels were around when I was around years ago, back in the nineties. You don’t forget those things. Those sort of lessons that get imprinted into your brain that the only place you can make money is if you’re the first or second into that marketplace, and that, that tends to be true. But I think GE has a, still has a really decent name in the marketplace and not, not, let’s say decent, probably is downgrading it.
It’s good make good products. Yeah, I think a lot of people are very happy. , it’s just surprising to see, just not getting as much traction as I thought that they would especially since they knew in 2021 that 2022 had to be a better year and it didn’t really move the needle much
Joel Saxum: in any of their press releases.
Do they, do they point to anything themselves of that 2.2 billion loss or do they just
Allen Hall: say We had, you know, it’s not one thing. Right, so it’s never one, one thing that that gets you. It’s, it’s a variety of different factors. War, the economy inflation, the supply chain sales group, maybe they lost an order that, that, you know, cascaded into several orders.
It’s hard to say. I think it’s really hard to say, and I think they’ll tell you that too. I don’t, every time I’ve been in discussions about , your even at weather guard, right? When we start looking at, you know, why are we at where we’re at? Well, it’s a, a series of probably a hundred different variable.
that we didn’t know about when the year started. Yeah. Just happened as you
Joel Saxum: got a business. One that I’m always watching with these, just considering sitting in the space that I do in the marketplace, is what are they looking at for warranty claims and, and ongoing costs that are unallocated? And that’s, that’s the number that I’m looking to see, right?
Because we’re always being asked from the insurance industry and we’re like, what, which ones the watch out for? What’s the, what’s the ones that we should be worried about? That’s definitely a metric we look for.
Allen Hall: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable.
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So if you haven’t seen it, there’s an article in Bloomberg called Wind Turbines Taller Than The Statute of Liberty Are Falling Over. That’s, that’s a nice headline, right? That’s yeah. Very search Worthy by Google. So they had, so the article kind of goes like this, Hey, a wind turbine collapsed in Oklahoma, and it was a GE turbine that was in service less than in a.
Okay. And then another turbine collapsed in Colorado a couple days later and they blamed the Colorado failure on a blade defect or a blade flaw. And all of a sudden now there’s a rash of wind turbine problems across US and Europe like, no. No, but the article continues. They, they talked to Gub, which was a major insurer and underwriter obviously, for wind energy.
And what Gub was saying is that they’re seeing failures happen in a shorter timeframe on newer turbines, and they’re concerned about it. Well, sure, if I’d insured ’em, I would be concerned about it too. And ge the CEO of Larry. Talked about this a little while ago. It says it takes time on new products to stabilize the production line and quality, and some of these are just birthing issues.
I, I think that’s, I think that’s valid. That seems like a reasonable explanation for some of it. Doesn’t make anybody happy, but then they go on to list some other ones. So Siemens CESA has had problems with the five x Blades, which everybody knows. Investors has, has had a number of warranty claims from 2019 on.
I think some of those have been related to lightning issues from news articles I’ve seen. So it’s not just a GE thing, it’s a Siemens ESA issue. It’s a vestus issue. So pretty much everybody has this. Wind turbines are a problem that they’re having early defects. Okay, what does this all mean? Joel, I don’t think it means anything right now.
The industry, the insurance industry will always adjust to whatever the marketplace is to manage costs, right. In the claims. This is, this is part of the normal cycle of new product developments and, and the insurance industry trying to adjust. And it’s not like I have to be careful. I, I’m, I’m, I read the article and like I should be alarmed, but I, I, I don’t think I’m alarmed.
Right. Yeah, it’s,
Joel Saxum: it’s the combination of a lot of things, but it’s kind of a normal, right? So the, the, yeah, the heavy, the heavy appetite and, well, we can start back. One, I, I always like this conversation say like, who runs the world? And everybody usually says banks. Well, no, it’s the insurance companies because you cannot, insurance companies, you cannot finance anything unless it’s I insured.
So the insurance companies eventually control the. You know, at a, when you, when you map it all out, that’s where it’s controlled from. So there was a heavy appetite, renewable energy, of course, a great ma great place to, to, it’s growing. It hasn’t been established yet. Like there’s not a lot of times that a, a multi-billion dollar industry comes to a trillion dollar industry comes along that you can all of a sudden jump into from an insurance standpoint or, or a whatever standpoint business in general.
So the insurance companies had a heavy appetite for getting. and or have had do and are jumping into it full force. So there’s a lot of insurance companies in there. GQ is not one of them that just kind of is by the seat of their pants, right? They’ve got a good team of risk engineers, underwriters, they’re doing their best to to, to hedge their risks and to understand what they’re inuring.
But a lot of people are just like, yeah, gimme 10% of that wind farm and they have no business being there. . So the, the eventually, yeah, I think that the premiums may correct, but it’s also the same thing we talk about here, where these innovation cycles and these guys are talking about it, right? The Siemens is talking about, Vestas is talking about it.
Larry Cope’s talking about the market wants the newer, bigger, better stuff all the time. And then that shortens the innovation cycle. So it kind of ties back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the episode with Vestas saying We’re stopping at 15 megawatts. In my mind, if, if they could do that for a while until they made the next jump to whatever it is and had a proper time for r and d and and that innovation cycle in their next model, that’s smart.
But what, what’s happening here? Mm-hmm. , you know, they’re not wrong. And, you know, we do a lot of RCAs. We, we find manufacturing defects. We find design issues, right. And lightning protection systems. And we’re looking at some other turbines right now that have some actual what looks to be design issues in them.
And that’s a product of going too. , so Well
Allen Hall: that’s a really good point, Joel, and because I, I was going through power and Energy Solutions Magazine from last year, right. So I’ve gotta sit in on my desk mm-hmm. , and I thought, okay, so what’s the, what’s the issue here? Is it because the OEMs do not have a, a decent way of tracking their products out in service?
And if I introduce a new wind turbine, say I introduce a new 15 megawatt wind turbine to the. and I just start selling them. Do I do, am I involved in the observation of how well they’re doing? Am I involved in the inspection? Because there’s an article in p e s magazine. It’s from Tom Sulzer Sulzer Schmidt, who does drone inspection.
So they have this really cool three DX system where they can tag every defect using a really, and Joel, you know more about it than I do, but they can tag every defect and change and track it as an individual chain. So the OEMs could actually, in theory, monitor their own product and catch stuff early.
That’s, that’s what I pick out of it, is that they can actually see where an issue. Pops up maybe in Nebraska before the rest of the fleet sees it, and then tell everybody like, Hey yeah, we need to reinforce this area, or we need to watch for these kind of cracks in this area. Is, doesn’t that make sense?
Like if, is Solar Schmidt’s doing it? Yeah. Like if I’m strategy, why, why wouldn’t, if I’m ge why don’t I say, Hey guys cool product. I’m gonna, I’m gonna hire you to monitor my new wind turbine. Does that make.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think absolutely. So like you know, I know thats Schmidt does a, a ton of inspections for Vestas on Vest’s point.
That is a great strategy from a, from a OEM getting one drone provider to basically cover, and I don’t know what soldier’s Schmid’s contract is like. Right. But if you had one drone provider to cover all of your FSAs, right? I know like GE in the US uses skys. On a lot of inspections. So if you’re, if you, but if you do that with one provider, with one platform, one system, then all of a sudden you can, you can build models and statistics off of this data.
But if you’re, if you’ve got 10 different suppliers feeding different things left and right with different AI systems telling you different categorizations, like none of that doesn’t work, right? It has to be standardized across the. . So if you come onto a, you know, like vests, they had to have seen something in Til Schmidt that said, these are the guys we want to use.
We like their 3D X platform. We like their drone solution. Yeah. And we like the way their, their assessments work, whether it’s with their AI or however. And we want to use this as the base for our, our inspections. Now they have to take that. That’s, that’s step one really. They have to take that data and then make actionable insights out of it from a, a fleet wide.
So, you know, there’s, there’s some large manufacture or large asset owners in the US that do this internally. Right? Like NextEra being one of ’em. They have so many turbines they’re really good at, at trying to understand what’s going on in the fleet, but they, they even, they have a limited view. Yeah.
Like, they may only have, I don’t know, you know, a hundred of these type of turbines or 400 of these type of turbines. They’re not, they’re not vests or GE or Siemens that has, you know, could have control or could have visibility into all of, So go to the next step. Right? So the next step is are they, if they’re doing this internally, that’s great, but are they sharing the data with anybody?
Are they doing anything to fix the problems or to solve the problems? I
Allen Hall: don’t know. Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good question. I, I hope that they are, and that’s the way the aviation industry is set up actually. And if you can think about, if you hop on a new Airbus, a 3 21 Neo, which I happen to be on, which is really nice.
You know, what they do with those airplanes is they do all the load tests and all the things to, to, to pass certification, and then they put the aircraft in service, but it doesn’t mean they don’t continue to test the airframe and monitor it. And there’s a, there’s a feedback loop that happens there.
So in the wind turbine world, we test, like rosemary used to do. They put blades out in service for a year or so and test them, and then they’re out in the world that starts selling them. The issue then becomes, Do I continue to do with those blades or do I continue to moderate and do I pass that information down?
The way that Boeing and Airbus run into this situation is they continue to test and test and test and test while they’re selling their product. And if they find a design flaw, they tell everybody because it’s a safety issue at the size of the wind, turbines are becoming now. It’s a safety. Yeah. One megawatt machine.
No one really cared too much about, but a 10 megawatt machine, I think everybody starts to care a little bit more. Do they do the insurance companies, I think you’re right, the insurance companies do kind of rule the world here, but are they connected with the drone companies like Soldier Smith to rule the world saying, Hey, we have, we, we know everything is happening behind the scenes dust.
Or GE or, or Siemens, KA Mesa, we know where your, we know where your problems are. Either pay us or work, or the operators are gonna pay us or somebody is, they have the best set of data and I can’t believe the insurance companies aren’t somehow getting isolated data, like clean data. The gap is that
Joel Saxum: they don’t know.
You know, it it, they need to be. . This is something that we fight in the industry a lot. Not fight. It’s something that we’re trying to help along, right? So we work on the CL claims side a lot. That’s, that’s pretty cut and dry, but the, that cyclical bit of data from the claims side and then taking that claims information and getting back with the underwriters and getting back with the brokers and then, and then after that, and the risk engineers, and then after that involving the insured to say, Hey, this is what we’re seeing from the claims process.
This is what’s going to be in your. Next year as far as the things you need to do let’s get together and make sure this is, this is proper so that you’re protecting everybody because what you, you, yeah. What you’re doing is you’re gonna keep the up, you’re gonna keep uptime for the asset owner.
You’re gonna lower the the premiums by not having as many failures. So the insurance company will make a little bit more money. The asset owner make a little bit more money, and the industry as a whole can celebrate you know, lower cost of energy and less failures. And, and that’s the way we look at it.
but there’s a gap there. It’s tough. It’s tough to, to tie that circle together. Because at the end of the day, you know, some of it’s driven by profits and whatnot as well. So you really have to run into the right risk engineers and the right underwriters to say, let’s, let’s share the data here. Let’s go through things.
Cause they’re concerned about doing their job. , right? Like I’ve, I’ve gotta get this policy written out and they, they don’t necessarily know that, oh, on this turbine from this manufacturer and this dates, we should be looking at this specific defect in there. And, and if they haven’t inspected it internally, then we shouldn’t put them on risk before we know this.
Like, they don’t, that information isn’t always there and that’s where like one of the things we’re trying to help with.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Does that mean there needs to be a regulatory framework to drive the connection between. The data and the insurance companies and the OEMs to close that loop, just to force the hand of it and say, Hey, I think it’s, if you have a serial defect, we need, we need to know it.
And it becomes a safety issue and we can find you for it. Which is a thing that is is, and I, and I don’t like doing this, but I, I kind of wonder, this is where always ends up because the dis. Will have to exist as once you have lawyers in the middle of it, , there are gonna be wide chasms between insurance and OEM and operators
Joel Saxum: the way they resolve it.
I’d like to see the, so the, the difficulty is, is we have the, you consistently see new players coming into renewable. energy insurance and reinsurance. So they’re coming from the classical energy world, they’re coming from the property world. They’re coming from all over the place. Every other six months, you see another couple of names.
You’re like, what are these guys doing in here? You know? Which is fine. Go and go and do your thing. Like, but don’t expect to not have some heavy losses that chance because you, you’re not doing proper risk engineering on, on what’s going on. So I think that if you could get. The, the good underwriters or the, I’m not gonna say good, but like the ones that hold a lot of the marketplace and get some of them on board with making sure that the asset owners and the OEMs are held accountable for what they’re doing in the field.
You might be able to close that loop from a financial standpoint. .
Allen Hall: So Gub is really set up for this, right? I mean, they’re one of them. Oh yeah. It’s clearly in position to do this, and Soldier Schmidtz is one of the drone companies that can be involved in that mix too. It that, that just makes logical sense.
But we’ll see. I, I, I don’t, I don’t think it’s gonna get resolved this year, not the way things are going at the moment. We’ll put the link to the power and energy solutions. On Sozo Schmidt in the show notes so you can see it. You can see what the three DX system is and get a sense of like how powerful this is to define defects and identify them early.
Cause I think that’s part of the key to getting rid of these turbine collapse issues as we can detect early. Makes a ton of sense to me. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. Take a moment and subscribe in the show notes below to the Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube Channel Engineering with Rosie.
And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
